It’s no more weird than a majority of us preferring a Christmas tree like this 🎄rather than 🌵
We’re a social, tribal species, so a shared, time-honoured experience of major festivals (even though nowadays we are in discrete family groups) is pretty much hardwired.
This festival, above all of them on these islands, has been among us too long not to have imprinted significant attachment to it in most people.
If Christmas is anything, it’s a traditional festive time, whether Christian (religious and/or cultural) or a pagan-adjacent Yuletide/Mid-Winter solstice observation.
Many have a blended kind of feeling in their bones about it all: culturally Christian with an old pagan mid-Winter appreciation alongside.
The trappings are similar, and the old-style roast beef was only replaced by birds owing to £sd.
Growing up in an Irish family, we always had a goose, maybe a capon (though the latter is probably as lorst and gorn as the pteradactyl these days).
Though I live alone now, I still find it extremely difficult not to cook myself some version of the traditional fare.
(I did try lamb once and maybe it was some odd coincidence on the day, but Christ it was miserable! I’m a good cook, but it just felt wrong)
I love and cherish the connection I feel with everyone out there enjoying a similar feast, and I know the days of this common approach to the great meal must be numbered, and all traditional menus will fade away.
I must sound like Little Miss Tragic, 1934. 🤣
That isn't to say anything is prescribed or in any other way an obligation, but it’s certainly not an apt description of the usual goings-on to refer to them as “weird’!